Standing there in orange polka-dot socks, jeans inching down my hips, I nodded soberly. He indicated we'd have more to talk about on the far side of the metal detector.

When my pie emerged, the questions began.

"What kind of pie is that?" He squinted at the pan.

"Apple. With some raspberries."

"Does it have lumps?"

I glanced at the crust, which was black in places and looked like a topographical rendering of the Himalayas. (To think I was trying to impress my boyfriend's parents in Illinois with this thing.)

"Yes, lots of lumps."

"Does it have" — he paused — "a gel filling?"

Alarms blared in my brain. They sounded like the familiar kitchen smoke detector. What was he getting at?

"No." I shook my head. "None of that."

He told me he was keeping watch for pies with cream and custard fillings. Anything that could be construed as a "gel." He'd already turned away a pumpkin pie.

Pumpkin pie filling, he confided, "has the same consistency as certain plastic explosives."

My pie was swaddled in Saran wrap and stowed in a translucent container. It was hard to see clearly through all that plastic. ("Is that a roast?" an airport worker had asked earlier, while examining my boarding pass.)

I put on a smile, half expecting the agent to pull out a dipstick. Or a fork.

Quietly, I fretted. If my pie made the no-fly list, my boyfriend and I would arrive in Illinois empty-handed. This was my first visit to his family. We had no other offerings for the Thanksgiving table.

And what would we tell them, anyway? "The TSA ate my pie?"

About a week before Thanksgiving, Michael and I were sitting in our living room in Northeast Portland, planning for the holidays.

He was skeptical when I suggested bringing his parents a pie.

Wouldn't it be a hassle? We had two flights and one layover on our way to Champaign, Ill. What if we didn't get past security?

Gravy, cranberry sauce and soup can't go through a security checkpoint, though they can fly in checked baggage. (Squish!) Pies get a pass, but they "might be subject to additional screening." That sounded good enough to me.

Michael and I set to work. We picked a recipe for apple-raspberry pie. (We weren't thinking about the consistency, just reacting to a report from his family: They already were making pumpkin and cherry.)

We chopped. We mixed. We wrestled with pre-made dough, then shoveled everything into our cantankerous antique oven. An hour later, filling was bubbling up through slits in the crust. It was a little charred. I scraped off the worst parts with a butter knife.

Then came travel day.

Passengers smiled at us on the airport shuttle. They asked about the pie. One woman said she was carrying a brick of frozen turkey stuffing in her luggage. (She'd marked the brick with a sign that said "STUFFING," she said, just in case the inspectors went through her things.)

"You won't be able to take it through," he said huffily. He offered to relieve us of the pie; his friend promised they'd save the pan.

We all laughed. But the real test lay ahead.

Portland International Airport was not the place to take a pie for the holidays. Local screeners weren't in tune with the latest policies, which, said TSA spokesman Nico Melendez, explicitly permit pie.

Between 20 and 25 Thanksgiving pies were blocked at the PDX security checkpoint. Passengers were told to pack the pies in their checked luggage, put them in parked cars or throw them away.

The only apparent pie problem outside Portland involved a cherry pie at Sacramento International Airport, Melendez said. After Thanksgiving, prompted by the confusion over pies, TSA distributed a nationwide reminder to its workers about holiday food rules.

My pie passed muster, but I'm still not sure why.

Maybe because it was lumpy. Maybe because it wasn't pumpkin. Who knows?